Posted at 8:00 a.m.
Players’ salaries
Knowing that NHL players don’t get paid for the playoffs, what happens to American League players who come in to replace injured players?
Sylvain Paquette
Response from Simon-Olivier Lorange:
Although it’s a widely held impression, it’s inaccurate to say that NHL players don’t get paid in the playoffs. The salary provided for in their contract is only paid during the season, but the collective agreement provides that an additional sum, established according to the revenues generated by the League, is divided between all the teams participating in the playoffs, and this, depending on their background. A club eliminated in the first round will therefore receive less money than the Stanley Cup champion. It is then up to each team to decide how to divide the money, which is done by secret ballot among the “regular” players. As a joke, an administrator of an NHL team points out that some are more tight-fisted than others. However, all the players who have played generally receive their share of the cake – you can bet, for example, that Louis Domingue will not leave empty-handed. Also, in 2020, all the teams had decided to pay all the players, since these had been stuck in the bubbles of Edmonton and Toronto for weeks, even months.
The COVID-19 clause
Of all the players who took advantage of the “opt out” clause due to COVID-19 in 2020, how many are still under contract with the same team? Has this choice harmed their professional development?
Yvon Wagner
Response from Simon-Olivier Lorange:
After checking, it doesn’t seem to have harmed anyone. Only seven players took advantage of this right which allowed them, without penalty, not to report to their respective clubs for the playoffs played in August and September in closed bubbles in Edmonton and Toronto. They are Travis Hamonic (Flames), Sven Baertschi (Canucks), Roman Polak (Stars), Mike Green (Oilers), Steven Kampfer (Bruins) and Karl Alzner (Canadian). Tuukka Rask of the Bruins joined the roster as the playoffs began. All cited family motives, with some providing more detail than others – including Kampfer, who explained that his wife and son had a congenital heart defect that put their lives at risk if they contracted COVID- 19. Three of them never played in the NHL again: Green announced his retirement, Polak remained in the Czech Republic and Alzner had his contract bought out by the Habs. It’s safe to say that the same fate would have awaited them even if they had played in the playoffs. Baertschi and Kampfer, accustomed to back and forth between the NHL and the American League, continued their routine with their respective teams. Hamonic signed with the Vancouver Canucks just before the start of the following season, and signed a two-year extension that summer. As for Rask, he remained the goalkeeper noh 1 of the Bruins, not for long, unfortunately, he who announced his retirement in March 2022 due to injuries.
PHOTO DAVID BOILY, THE PRESS
Artturi Lehkonen, while wearing the Canadiens uniform
Transactions after the deadline
It was forbidden to make transactions after March 21 in 2022. But when are transactions allowed again? Could a transaction between two teams eliminated from the playoffs be allowed, even during the playoffs?
Charles Menard
Response from Guillaume Lefrancois:
Technically, transactions remain permitted after the deadline. Only, for a player to be eligible for the playoffs, he must be part of the team in question on the day of the trade deadline. The Canadian could therefore very well have exchanged Artturi Lehkonen on March 22, except that Lehkonen would then not have been eligible to play in the playoffs! Then, nothing would prevent two eliminated teams from making a trade between them. Except that the CEOs who would explore a transaction at this time would deprive themselves of a good part of the market (the teams still alive or which have just been eliminated and which are still evaluating their resources). These are good reasons to wait for the period of effervescence between the end of the playoffs and the draft, period during which the biggest markets are concluded.
Record of mediocrity?
With only three goals in their series against Tampa Bay, have the Florida Panthers set a record?
Pietro Di Paolo
Response from Katherine Harvey-Pinard:
No, the Panthers did not set a record. Far from it, I would even say. In total, it has happened 85 times in NHL history that a team has scored three goals or less in a series. In addition, six teams have scored zero in their series, but the last time was in 1939 (New York Americans). If we reduce our sample based only on series that lasted four games, as in the case of the Panthers vs. Lightning duel, the palm for the fewest number of goals, or 1, belongs to the Minnesota Wild of 2003. he team then led by Jacques Lemaire was shut out by the Anaheim Ducks in its first three games of the conference final. She scored just one goal in the fourth game.